Location: In Connecticut, on the Housatonic River near its mouth at Long Island Sound.

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Mac OS X screenshots

I have been chastized for attaching PDF screen shots, but that is what Mac OS X makes natively when you click the useful and accessible Option-Shift-4. There appears to be no way to change the file type (except by opening the PDF in Photoshop or something and making a different kind of file, which in my experience is likely to make a mess). And David Pogue implies as much in his OS X Missing Manual, so I suspect it is true.

Tell you the truth, PDF does seem like overkill for screen shots. So I am looking at Grab (in the Mac OS Applications/Utilities folder), which makes TIFFs. It places the image on the screen — then you have to save it or print it. Maybe I can get used to this.

Pogue recommends SnapzPro X, so I also went to the Ambrosia web site and downloaded a 30-day demo. That allows for gif, png, jpg, tiff, pdf, bmp, pict, and maybe a couple more formats (including movies), but I do not see a way to set this in Prefs (and I am not sure that the choice is sticky). In fact, this seems like overkill, and it also has no instructions that I can see. Costs $70 after the trial period.

So: What do you think about PDF screenshots? And what do you use to make them?